


I.  The Cuckoo's Child

by twistedchick



Series: Life, Refracted [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Gen, Multiple Universe, alternate interpretation of canon, anomaly travel, life refracted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-12
Updated: 2009-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:02:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helen finds more than one new world on the other side of the anomaly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I.  The Cuckoo's Child

At first everything went wrong and she nearly died.

She only outran the gorgonopsid by stumbling into the next anomaly she saw, which took her to a Paleozoic seashore. It was nearly night there, and she couldn't see in the dark after the anomaly closed. All around her she could hear the sounds of creatures moving; she could only guess which ones they were. But another anomaly sparkled down the beach; she ran toward it and through it, and into a dying forest where the air felt cool. She found a recognizable tree she could climb, to avoid whatever might be there, tied herself to the trunk and let herself sleep.

That became her life. Waking up, eating something, avoiding animals chasing her, climbing trees and rocks to get away from animals that didn't climb, running to escape the slow ones, swimming to escape the ones that didn't like water, getting back on land to escape the fish and sea creatures. And every day looking for another anomaly to go through, to try to find her way home.

The air smelled different, full of scents she didn't know. Sometimes it was harder to breathe, sometimes much easier. The sun was brighter and hotter or still bright but the air was cooler. Sometimes it lay hidden behind different clouds than she knew, and once or twice the clouds were filled with ash or sulfur that choked her and made her backstep into another place, another time, if only to continue breathing.

It didn't take long for her to realize that she couldn't go back. There was no map, no way of charting a path but chance. She was on her own, in the past, and that was how it was. Farewell, Nick, my love. Farewell, sweet Stephen.

She nearly starved when her supplies ran out, because the _Guide to Edible Plants_ in her pack didn't cover extinct species, and she couldn't be sure that the creatures around her had a similar enough digestive system to human that she could eat what they ate. It took two more jumps until she found a recent enough time that included small mammals, so she could get some greens into her diet, and some fish that she could catch without being worried that they'd eat her first. She became expert at making a fire from whatever would burn. When she found herself muttering the scientific names of the creatures she was eating, she sat back and laughed, for the first time since the gorgonopsid. Who knew that a doctorate in paleobiology would actually be relevant to everyday life?

Clothing wore out too quickly. After a while, in temperate areas, she wore only what she needed most for protection from local fauna and the elements, and stored the rest in her pack. Fortunately, when what remained was more rags than anything else, she happened upon a time when humans had civilizations – but not late enough that she could talk to anyone about her experiences. She stole some clothing and food, and snuck back through the anomaly. After that, she listened at anomalies before going through; if she could discern any human noise, she would look through carefully; if it was safe, she went through. It was never the era she came from, never a place that she knew, but it was close enough that she could manage to avoid the local police with her newly honed skills. She could hide without being detected, run to avoid lights, slip silently past guards, though she encountered few of them in the rural areas where the anomalies tended to open. Soon, when she found the right anomaly, she could steal clothing from clotheslines, skip out, skip back and go for more. She broke into a shoe store and stole sneakers and hiking boots and socks, oh god, so many socks, and shoelaces – so handy for use other than in shoes – and then found a sporting-goods store, sprayed paint on their security cameras and picked up other supplies, wire for traps and monofilament and hooks for fishing and good knives and fire-starters – and was gone again. For the fun of it she left a genuine doubloon on the counter by the register, and half wanted to be there when the store opened to see whether anyone realized its value.

Of course it was real; she'd taken it off the body herself as part of a small bag of coins and unset gems. The man had stumbled into an anomaly that dropped him into the Middle Devonian era with a broken leg, probably two days earlier. Nothing out there to bother him, really, compared with other eras, but he was terrified by the giant horseshoe crabs and raving with fever, the gangrene in his leg climbing toward his body. She'd given him water, and he'd begged for death, which she'd granted him after realizing there was no way for her to get him back to his own time and place safely, nor any reasonable way for her to cure his gangrene. She'd taken what few goods he'd had, and put the body into the water to be eaten, so the fossil record wouldn't show evidence of an unexpected human at the wrong time. The flintlock pistol went for enough at an antique shop for her to re-equip herself legitimately, for a change, and to buy enough supplies in cash to stash in convenient locations so she need never show up in Nick's time inadequately clad if she had time to reach them. Every stash had dried food, bottled water, an assortment of clothing, some antiseptic creme, fishline with hooks, antibiotics with a long shelf life, multitool, rope, string, a small sewing kit, bits of leather and other repair supplies, and several kinds of knives, from folding pocket knives to military survival knives to a fine-edged fillet knife, and always, always a sharpening stone. All of it was wrapped in a camouflaged poncho or tarp or other cloth that would not draw either animal or human attention and that would survive the elements – and that would be useful for shelter in some other era.

Knives were good for dealing with the creatures she couldn't outrun, outclimb, or hide from. She had to think before swimming, to make sure she wouldn't be some early fish's snack. Her survival skills were honed as sharp as her blades now. From the top of a huge cycad she found herself laughing despite the small lizards hopping at the trunk. Many smaller reptiles, she found, tasted like a young chicken that had been eating strongly flavored greens, like mustard or onions. And when she realized she knew how to start a small fire in the wet top of a huge ferny cycad, a fire that would cook her food without the danger of burning down her refuge, she ate roasted lizard with lightly-toasted fiddle fern tips and then slept for a full day, her ragged, mudstained jacket shielding her from the sun.

What a survival course she could teach in the 21st Century, if she had the chance! Not that she could tell anyone where she'd learned to climb rocks like a goat, or gather pteranodon eggs for breakfast, or run faster than any Olympic champion when she was being chased, or smear herself with the local dirt to disguise her scent when being stalked by something she might be able to turn around and kill for food.

She always had to be sure to acquire new dirt when going through every new anomaly. The prevalent spores or minerals from one era would smell shockingly out of place in another, as if she were waving a "here I am" flag for the new era's nastier inhabitants. Human sweat itself was an unknown scent in these times and had to be disguised one way or another, however disgusting. Disgust didn't matter; staying alive did. After a year or so she could have taught a doctoral course on the various properties of dung from assorted animals, what it indicated about the animal that produced it, what other creatures were attracted to or repelled by it. Predator dung could be useful, but it depended on the company she kept. She had managed to travel with a herd of maiasaurs for a fairly restful month or so by rolling in their dung; it smelled more like mulched grass chippings than anything else. One unexpected side effect had been that they had been more careful not to step on her, as if she had been one of their young despite her odd two-legged appearance and comparatively tiny size. She'd stayed vegetarian then, or kept her protein intake to fish, and survived, though she'd lost a bit of weight in running to keeping up with them.

Over time, over so many times, so many places, she lost track of the times and dates of her birth-era. Was it two years or five years later when she found the controller that let her open and close anomalies? Was it another six months or a year before she figured out everything it could do? She felt herself growing older, thinner, more wiry, and knew she'd gone as far as she could in that direction when her period stopped; she'd read the reports, back in her old life, of how that happened to athletes who trained too hard and how it would return when her body put on enough fat to store estrogen again. It was just as well; blood attracted carnivores. Anyway, she didn't want a child now, not that there was anyone around with whom she could get one. She just wanted to keep going, to explore, to learn as much as possible about everything.

And she was remarkably healthy. It amazed her. As a child, she'd caught every cold virus that wandered by, but now, in the time before humans, she was apparently in the time before cold viruses as well. She had more to worry about from broken bones, exhaustion, starvation and suffocation; viral illness wasn't even a concern.

The pirate wasn't the only human she found who had come accidentally through an anomaly. Once she realized what to look for, she found a few dozen individuals in widely scattered time periods, all of them dead, near the places where anomalies opened. To protect the future, she buried none of them, broke up the bones of the skeletons, and took whatever imperishable items (such as plastics) or useful items (weapons, clothes, personal items) were there. Every once in a while what she found kept her alive, and although she wasn't in the least religious she found a moment to mentally thank the nameless person who had contributed to her continuing existence.

That was how she found the controller, half buried in Paleolithic Era mud next to a woman's body that was already so decomposed that it was hard to tell what time it had come through from. The clothing was weathered to gray rags, the shoes to shreds of rubber and broken leather bits. The strands of hair that had not been taken away for some creature's nest had once been long and brown, sunlightened in places. Only the pelvis and the delicate shape of the facial bones told her the body was female. She found no jewelry, not a ring or an earring, and there was not enough remaining to indicate if the body's ears had been pierced or if there had been a tattoo.

She herself had been away from people alive or dead for nearly a year, by her own count, and so she crouched next to the body to give it a sketchy forensic examination; she had the time, and that day she felt whimsical: I am alive, you aren't; I will pay some respect to your death.

Broken right leg, that was certain. Broken right arm as well, a clean fracture from something hitting heavily, and what looked like defensive tooth marks on the bones of the other arm. This woman had been a fighter, come through an anomaly from another time while trying to escape something with very sharp teeth and considerable strength. From the way the bones lay, it appeared that her shoulder had been dislocated, as if something had grabbed her arm and twisted hard, trying to pull her apart. She must have taken that last blind step through the anomaly in the hope of getting home, but in the Paleolithic, injured and without supplies, she had died of her injuries and of exposure.

Poor girl. What had she been carrying? A leather satchel, empty and entirely rotted, with the side of it ripped out where some scavenger had taken whatever food she must have carried. There was nothing salvageable except for the brass ring and latch, which could be reused. The body must have been there for months; it was now spring, so she had died before the winter. If only the woman had emerged from the anomaly inside the valley, and a few months later, they might have met, but this was outside the area where she usually hunted, and so they had missed each other.

It would have been nice to see another living human again, however briefly. She found herself murmuring apologies to the woman as she scattered her bones.

She almost passed by the controller, but when the sunlight glinted on the flat surfaces she picked it up and realized it was made of no substance she knew, neither plastic nor metal nor stone. A cool breeze made her shiver; the glaciers were growing again, and she would have to find a warmer place to test the device. She dropped it into her pack, climbed back over the crest of the hill and retreated to her small cave above a river, where she had stashed supplies and the first skins she'd learned to tan, and the bone needle she'd made.

She hadn't gone completely native yet; she was still learning flint-knapping because she wanted to be able to make stone knives, to save the blades she carried with her. The cave was small, too small for cave bears or for the big cats to use, heated by a vent from a warm spring somewhere deep inside the mountain that flowed out far enough below the cave opening to keep wanderers from stumbling over her. At that point the water was cool; inside the cave it was warm enough for bathing, if she was careful, since there was little light and any accident could be her last. But if she was careful to render the fat of any sizeable animals she killed, and molded herself a little bowl from the native clay by the river, and braided wisps of flax stems to serve as a wick, she could reinvent the lamp and bathe in nearly as much safety as at any spa. And bathing, even without soap, would help disguise her scent and make it easier for her to stalk her dinner.

Dinner was the spit-roasted haunch of a small deerlike creature, with the rest of the meat strung up on sticks over the fire to dry. After she'd rubbed its skin with its brains to tan it and set it aside for later use, she turned the odd oblong thing over in her hands, examining it by firelight. It was no technology she'd ever seen before. It had no buttons or symbols on it, but certain areas fitted under her fingers, softened and moved as she touched them – and a small anomaly opened in front of her, half in the stone roof of the cave, the other half dropping water and a hand-sized fish at her feet. Her jaw fell open and she did something with it and the anomaly closed. She sat in shock for a long moment, then put the device back into her pack, her hands shaking.

The fish was still there, flopping near the fire, glaring at her balefully over a jaw with too many teeth. She killed it with a rock, cleaned and scaled it with the sharpest of her flint tools, cooked it on a hot rock by the fire and had it for dessert. She smashed the bones and threw them out the cave entrance into one of the scrubby trees below for some bird's breakfast.

From late spring through early autumn she stayed in the cave, hunted in the long narrow valley between the mountains, and played with the device until she had figured out how to get it to open an anomaly where she wanted, into whatever era she wanted, and how to close it again. She learned to listen when an anomaly opened, to close it at once if certain kinds of sounds were too close, such as the hunting cry of an allosaur or the growl of a cave bear, or less familiar noises that sounded unsafe, such as the rapid uneven clicking that could indicate the presence of something with giant claws. If nothing dangerous could be heard, she moved close enough to look through carefully and see what era the anomaly opened into, the landscape, the weather, perhaps the season. And then she closed it, made a note in her journal, and moved on to the next one.

The journal, a leather-bound blank book Nick had given her on the last birthday they'd celebrated together, became her one constant companion. It was coded in a combination of the notehand she'd used at the university, for taking down lectures verbatim in the era before conveniently sized recorders, and a variety of references from scholarly works that only she was likely to remember. Coding it amused her, kept a different part of her mind working from the part that hid and ran and jumped.

She had to keep alive that part of her that understood mathematics and language and such esoteric things as manners and the rules of the road. She had to remember these things, so she would be able to fit back into society when she returned to her own time and place.

She was safe enough where she was, for now. She had water, a place to sleep, and fairly easy access to food – fish, recognizable plants and berries, some of the smaller wild game – and no other humans to deal with. For whatever reason, the valley seemed empty of major predators – but it was also empty of the herds of hairy rhinoceros and mammoth that they followed, so that was less of a surprise. She'd walked for miles in every direction and seen no evidence of Neanderthals, but the studies she'd seen indicated they tended to remain in their own territories for centuries at a time. Since there were only supposed to be about 100,000 in what would be continental Europe at this time, it wasn't surprising that they weren't living in the caves near her or hunting in her valley. It would be more surprising if she ever saw one, considering they, too, tended to live near where there was big game.

After the summer, when the warm winds turned cold and she'd outfitted herself in new leathers and created a full set of obsidian knives to bring with her, she saw the first snow beginning to blow in beyond the next mountain and decided to leave. She could comfortably predict which era an anomaly would open into by now; she opened one and walked from chilly rock into an old-growth forest (at which thought she choked down a laugh) on a warm late-spring day, startling a small family of wood bison and alarming the crows in the trees. This era was too late; there would be humans around. She opened a new one, onto a rocky shore that looked like the Mediterranean. A stream of fresh water flowed into the sea from between uncut cedar trees growing above the beach. The sky was overcast enough to keep her eyes from being dazzled by sparkling water; she resolved to pick up several pairs of good sunglasses the next time she ventured back into the late 20th-early 21st centuries. The air felt warm and comfortable, too warm for furs but not for leathers, and she stopped by a rock long enough to roll up and pack the coat of tanned hair-on skins that she finished making a month earlier. There was an overhang well above the water line that looked promising for shelter, plenty of wood for a cooking fire, and she could see the fish leaping in the water, birds in the trees and something rabbitlike that was coming down to the stream for a drink.

But it took two more years of painstaking trial and error interspersed with the need for survival before she could even begin to feel comfortable with the idea of returning to anywhere near where Nick was, or where she might reasonably expect that he'd turn up. Sometimes, when she thought of coming back, she considered showing up where Stephen was first; he'd always believed her, always been interested in her ideas even when Nick considered them over the moon. But she and Nick had quarreled, and he was one of those stubborn Scots when it came to remembering a fight.

She had to plan her trip back to her birth-world, as she thought of it. She didn't trust luck. Her luck alone hadn't sustained her when she'd been stalked by a smilodon and had only escaped by using the controller and going wherever it opened, snapping the anomaly shut as soon as she was through. It had been close; the smilodon's paw had been cut off. She wore the claws around her neck on a leather strip for years, only taking it off when she was ready to step through to find Nick again. Wearing it would have seemed like boasting.

No, planning and knowledge were her friends, not luck. She had learned to control either the time or the exact place where an anomaly would open; she had not figured out how to do both reliably so far, though she was sure it was possible. With her luck, she'd fall out of an anomaly at Nick's feet. With slightly different luck, it would be at Stephen's feet. Stephen's respect for her survival skills would gain her a great deal, she thought; he was much more likely to trust what she said than Nick was, now. It was the difference between admiration and love. Nick had loved her deeply, a long time ago, but he thought he knew her, and he was enough of a scientist not to let his emotions cloud his judgment. It made him both smarter and stupider, she thought, as it led him to doubt her when she was telling the truth. She still loved him, in her own way; he was the man with whom she most wanted to share the adventure she was living.

If she were sentimental, she would think of Stephen as a younger version of Nick who had retained the optimism and adventurousness of the time when they were first married, when they had gone together to Brazil on that expedition to research giant ground sloths and other Oligocene fauna, or later when they were on the dig in Wyoming where an adventurous coyote had snatched one of Nick's favorite sweaters that had had soup spilled on it. He'd sworn at the coyote but laughed about it, too. Did Nick still laugh at all? Stephen's laughter was hidden deep in his eyes; he could say more with them than any man she'd met. Stephen was also a skilled marksman, a runner, someone whose ability to deal with adverse environments was likely far greater than Nick's, though she wouldn't underestimate Nick's broad knowledge and creative ways of using it.

But she had no room for sentiment any more about either of them, or anything else. Sentiment hindered survival.

The day she decided to return, her luck held. She came out of an anomaly that she snapped shut behind her in the Forest of Dean, some few kilometers from the larger anomaly that she knew would be there. It was one of those that opened on a schedule almost like clockwork, like that geyser in America that could be timed, but only occasionally were creatures anywhere near enough to wander through. She'd used it, last time, for a raid on a camping shop where she'd escaped just ahead of the police cars rolling into the parking lot. In fact, she was still wearing what she'd taken then.

This time three creatures had passed through the other anomaly – a tank of a scutosaurus, harmless unless it stepped on you, a gorgonopsid whose appearance gave her an involuntary shiver, safe as she was in a tree high enough above it that the wind would take her scent, and one of those small harmless lizards that flirted and flew over the valley. This time the gorgonopsid had caused enough havoc that Nick and Stephen had been called to look at the Forest of Dean, Stephen with curiosity and Nick with disdain at first and then caution. There were a couple of young kids with them, and a suit from the City and far too many armed military for her taste. She shook her head as she sat in the tree, a hundred feet above them and off to the side, and observed them not seeing her; it was a good thing for them that they weren't stepping through the anomaly because their lack of three-dimensional thinking could get them killed in a breath.

They'd learn.

They'd have to.

She'd begun to see how evolution worked through the ages, and they wouldn't survive otherwise.

It was only after she'd dropped the living ammonite on Nick's desk and had gone back through an anomaly opened at random from a list of safer ones she kept in mind, and from there to another, that she realized she had far more options than she'd ever expected.

She had thought she'd come out into the Forest of Dean that she knew, until she realized that the houses built nearby weren't there; the forest continued uninterrupted for several miles more in that direction, to the boundaries set up by William the Conquerer in her own time. And beyond that unmarred oak forest stood a building she'd never seen, its arching glass and steel like the jaws of a giant mechanical creature facing back toward the anomaly as if in defense. Her binoculars showed her the logo: Anomaly Research Center.

Oh, that was different. Well, she had time to explore. How many alternate Britains could there be?

She slid her controller, her key to time itself without the need for Time Lord fantasies, back into her pack and walked down the pavement, away from the ARC and into town. Behind her, the curving glass wall shone in the rising sun.

Newspaper stands didn't exist any more. Interesting. She fingered the money in her pocket, found two pieces of eight, suitably aged in salt water where she'd stored them for a few centuries, and a gold doubloon and sold them to a coin dealer who didn't ask her where they came from. The money she received looked enough different from what she carried that she put it into a different pocket to avoid confusion. She squinted at the portrait on a coin. Queen Zara? How far down the royal line of succession had she been, and what could have put her onto the throne? It didn't matter. She didn't need to be picked up as a counterfeiter, especially since she wasn't sure where her own identity lay in this version of the world. All she knew was that if she'd been able to move through from her time to this one, and the code to find this place was part of the controller's memory already, she could go back and forth at will.

It fascinated her that she was able to move not only through geological time but from one alternate universe to another, as if they lay side by side, barely a breath distant one from another. It wasn't supposed to be possible, according to what she thought she knew, but there she was. It was enough to make her think she should have studied more quantum theory. It wasn't enough now for her to be only a paleobiologist who had concentrated on studying adaptations in evolutionary physiology; she needed to know more.

Where was this universe's Helen Cutter? Or, to be more precise, Helen Suzanne Farquhar? Would she even have the same name? It was a different world. Anything was possible. Perhaps her parents had never met here. She needed to learn more – the last century's-worth of history, more depth in recent events. The breeze brought her the smells from a chip shop and her stomach rumbled.

She circled through the neighborhoods until she found a worldnet café and paid for an hour's time online with a visitor's sign-in, a double-sized coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Oh, god, eight years without ham and cheese; her taste buds were rioting in approval. She leaned toward the monitor. In that hour she read as much as she could, tracked down the names of everyone she knew who had worked with Nick Cutter and found herself, or rather her own obituary. She'd apparently vanished while working on a government-funded research project in the Forest of Dean several years before. How many? Five? What year was it now? It didn't matter. All she'd have to do, if she wanted to be part of what was going on here, was to show up at the door. They would welcome her back with open arms, and she'd be able to get her hands on any research she wanted.

When she slipped back through the small sparkly anomaly in the park, she left a cache of supplies wrapped in plastic in the hollow of a tree in that universe's Forest of Dean. The worlds might be different, but the trees were the same.

* * *

She observed Nick and his team back in her birth-world from various perches in the Forest of Dean and elsewhere, far enough away that she could see them at work and avoid their attention. With her hearing fine-tuned for survival, she could catch enough of their discussion to know what directions their thoughts might go. They weren't bad together, she had to admit; they were all still alive even though they made abysmal mistakes. Did they never consider that danger might exist that came from above human eye level?

Nick appeared to have mourned her and moved on. The new interest had brown eyes, fluffy longish hair and the expression of a startled deer that wasn't quite sure what to do with those antlers, whether to charge or to run away. The fluffy deer was smart enough to agree to be rescued from carniverous pterosaurs, which made her more interesting in certain ways.

The children, Connor and Abby, seemed competent, at least, in not being eaten by anything that came through the anomaly, though they seemed as unobservant as that fluffy girl. She could ignore them.

Then Lester's militia went through into the past, captured her and dragged her through an underwater anomaly against her will. It didn't matter. They thought they were in control, but she eluded them and escaped through the Field of Smoke and Mirrors, her name for the rolling grassland that always had twenty or more anomalies from all sorts of eras, all open at once. She could use it to wander in and out of the Forest of Dean on her own schedule, taking breaks anywhere else she wanted, even back in her Paleolithic cave once when she had an appetite for the small deer in that valley. It had been summer in the valley, and while she was there, resting in her cave and eating smoked venison, she figured out how to adjust the controller for time, geological era and location all at once.

She bounced in and out of time and dropped clues in front of Nick and his crew like penny sweets and they bit every time. It was comforting, in a way, but it frustrated her that they never intuited the next step, that she had to spoon-feed them so much. After a while, she simply resorted to opening anomalies and sitting back to watch the result, but from ever further distances. She had her own agenda, her own schedule, and from what she observed none of them had figured it out.

* * *

Part way through the months it took for her to set up what she wanted in ARC-world, while she worked out the details, she found a third version of Britain in which to rest.

This one was wealthier, and the population appeared much smaller. As long as she dressed for her position – an independent historical researcher visiting from Canada, spending her time at libraries and archives – and minded her accent, she was left alone. The reigning monarch on the coins here was Harry, who took advice from the fashionable Queen Mother Diana, whose profile alternated with HRH Harry's on the plastic cards used instead of paper bills. Only the very poor or immigrants still used actual money, she found, but the coin collector loved her doubloons; she said she'd inherited them from an elderly historian uncle who had never had them appraised.

"Wise man, your uncle." The collector weighed the soft gold in his palm. "Good thing for you they're old; it's illegal to privately own gold coin now. "

"Are you saying you can't buy them?"

"Not at all, miss. Not at all. The law applies to currently minted coin, all of which is retained by His Majesty for the treasury. Government purposes, balance of trade, you understand. But I have many customers outside this country who can still own coin. If you should find yourself coming into another inheritance, or should wish to sell more from your uncle, please bring it to me."

He charged her plastic with the equivalent of two years' salary for a university chancellor in that world, about eight times what she would have made where she was born. Pity she couldn't transfer the balance, but soon wealth wouldn't matter anyway.

And in the meantime she had this version of the world as a refuge.

She rented a hotel room, took a shower – oh, luxurious hot water and shampoo! She took a nap, safe from predators, and went out to buy clothes that were the fashion where she was now, so she could travel without being visually singled out. Then she got coffee at Ye Olde Globenet Café and went online to look for Nick, but Nick wasn't there, wasn't anywhere, not at his public school outside Glasgow, not at either of his universities, not at the rowing club he'd belonged to when they met. Eventually she found a small notice of an automobile accident years earlier that killed Jacob and Ina Cutter and their twelve-year-old son, Nicholas, on an icy road between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The historical section of the globenet told her that Prince William had abdicated the throne a decade earlier. An editorial from that time lamented that the prince could marry his love, the Honourable Duncan Burns, but could not rule because the Marquis was a member of the New Catholic Orthodox Church and the prince had been married there and had become a member as well. He had been able to keep his title but had been moved down the line of succession, in accordance with the Revised Succession Act of 1937, and now would only be given the crown if there were no other royals available; he would inherit before any commoners could. Must be quite an odd thing for him to be the spare and not the heir now, she thought, and moved on.

There was no ARC here. Sir James Lester had gone into banking instead of the Home Office and was a director of the Bank of England. Stephen was working as a cartographer at Oxford, and the registry listed his spouse as Abigail Maitland, director of Animal Rescue Britain, a registered charity under the patronage of the Queen Mother Diana. She didn't find the Temple boy, but figured that if he hadn't connected with the others he wouldn't be a concern.

She leaned back and sipped a second mocha with whipped cream, just because she could, and she considered her options.

When she left, she wandered the neighborhood and found a likely building, convenient to shopping without a car, still within walking distance of the Forest, which she found was now called the Royal Park. She had no trouble renting a small flat with the references she'd forged. Life was pleasant; she rediscovered a taste for certain kinds of pastries, though she had apparently moved beyond enjoyment of any sort of pickle or relish; too much like spoiled vegetation for her tastes now.

While she was setting up events in ARC-Britain, she also set them up in her birth-world, much more carefully. The timing had to be precise. It made her wonder: since a sufficiently momentous event could have repercussions across the universes, apparently splitting out new universes from old – the difference between King Harry and Queen Zara had to have come from somewhere – would it make enough difference for her to concentrate only on one universe and let the chips fall where they may?

Unfortunately, there was no one she could trust enough to ask this sort of question. She had tried to search on the globenet for information on physics and relativity and found that it was classified. She stopped immediately, told the official face that had appeared onscreen that she had mistyped and was really searching for information on physical fitness and relationship disorders, and the official face noted her excuse and vanished. It shook her; what else could be restricted here in King Harry's realm that she didn't know about? How did one find out what subjects were not to be spoken of if nobody spoke of them? But she put that concern aside for the moment. She would simply have to make sure that she was in control in the other two universes for that one brief event.

* * *

She hadn't lied to her Nick, though it would have been easy to since he never believed her now anyway. She did want him to come with her. She did want company on the adventure. He didn't understand how he was privileging his time over other times, his place over other places, making his knowledge parochial when he could have used his scientific understanding to pursue true scholarship of so much more that had not been explored.

But her own Nick's continued private rejection of her as a woman touched deeper emotions within her than she expected. At first she had taken his refusal to share a bed as simply another step in the pavane they were dancing with one another. Nick couldn't be pushed but he could be persuaded, though he was as hard to shift as the Grampians when he'd made his mind up – it could take a virtual geologic age just to wear him down a little. But that took time, which was something she had no problem with overall, though it meant reorganizing her personal schedule repeatedly. She could do that.

She did love him, whatever that meant; she valued his skill and knowledge and personal strengths, and she knew she could trust his integrity. If he said he'd do something, he'd do it. The difficulty was to get him to say it.

So she waited.

And then, just before they stepped through the anomaly to the Permian with the predator kits, Claudia Brown ran up to kiss him – and he kissed her back, emphatically, and spoke happily about it afterward with a smile on his face.

Her dour Scotsman, smiling over that bit of fluff who wouldn't survive a day in the past, let alone eight years.

Anger flared within her. It wasn't as if she'd run around through the eras of time having flaming _affaires_ with unknown men. She'd been hungry and cold much of the time, or dehydrated and overheated and without water, and always alone. She'd gone for some years without seeing another living human being, and for others only seeing them at a distance while she shoplifted the necessities of her life. With the exception of the pirate, all the humans she'd found in the past were long dead. Yet Nick was treating her as if she'd been touring the world naked with an invitation to all and sundry.

Maybe she should have told him about Stephen before. It couldn't have made things any worse.

If Nick had been kissed against rather than kissing back, if he'd shrugged and made it seem that the attraction was only on Claudia's side, she would not have gone ahead with what she'd set up. She would have worked with him, would have come home to him between trips elsewhere, would have been willing to talk to him about what she knew.

It wasn't just that he didn't trust her. He did still love her; if he didn't love her, he wouldn't have been so emphatic about not sharing a bed with her. If he didn't still love her, it wouldn't have mattered.

If he didn't still love her, Stephen wouldn't have mattered either. He and Stephen were all but the same person anyway, except in bed; that didn't change, even in different universes.

But he had cared and still rejected her, and had chosen that girl instead. And for that reason he would have to learn what it was to have his life unutterably changed without notice.

She could have altered her plans, her possibilities, up to that point. Nothing was written in blood on stone yet.

But if Nick should find himself in a world he didn't like, he had only himself to blame.

* * *

She hadn't lied, to her Nick or to Stephen, who was always hers in any world if she wanted him. She did want to find the way to the future, but she'd hoped Nick and his team would have thought of a better way to use the future predator to find it. That boy Connor was cleverer than she'd thought; given time, he could have figured out something that would have spared them all from danger. But the existence of the clutch of predator kits took that possibility out of the running; they would have to use the kits to find the anomaly.

She thought of her Nick returning to that fluffy girl, and she went ahead.

It was the work of moments for her to vanish from the Permian hillside during the fight with the future predator and the soldiers, just at the emergence of the gorgonopsid –

for her to jump through to a seashore of trilobytes and back again to the corresponding branch of the Permian in ARC-Britain, where the other Nick and the other soldiers were setting up camp –

for her to forcibly seal all anomalies leading to that place with her controller and leave by the last one –

for her to come back to the seashore and then to the Permian era of her birth-world with ancient seawater drying on her boots—

for her to run toward the live anomaly she hadn't opened and peer through just far enough to glimpse two predators near the doorway of a damaged building; she backed out quickly, registered it in the controller, closed it –

for her to close the anomaly they'd come through from the birth-world future and to open the path to 21st Century ARC-Britain in its place and to run back over the hill.

Within three minutes she was back next to Nick, where he was leaning over the body of one of the soldiers. Ryan, she thought his name was. The other soldiers' bodies were beyond recovery, torn to shreds. As the two of them buried Ryan in the sand to preserve the future site that Nick had previously found, she told him she'd found the anomaly leading to the future and watched for his reaction.

And he still rejected her. He wanted only the life he'd left behind, in her birth-world, with that girl.

Fair enough. Up to that point she'd been willing to discard her plan, even though it meant letting him know she had the controller, but now he'd made his bed. Let him try to sleep in it alone.

* * *

How could her Nick, who noticed everything, not realize immediately that she'd brought him back to a different Forest of Dean? Had she jumped from universe to universe so often that she automatically registered changes in clothing and behavior? The harmless children from her birth-world moved and acted far more competent here, and Stephen looked friendly and approachable instead of reserved. But this time she stayed in ARC-Britain only long enough to taunt her own Nick about Stephen, and to invite Stephen to come with her – a stagy invitation she didn't expect he'd take, though she caught his smile as he told her she was a bitch. This world's Stephen had unexpected depths in his humor. They'd had a good time in the past, and they would again; she wasn't finished with him yet.

Nick had just begun to realize that his Claudia wasn't there, and to panic. She smiled, then stepped back into the anomaly and closed it behind her.

* * *

She didn't have to go directly to the future; she could go there whenever she liked, now that she had the address in the controller.

And she had unfinished business to deal with.

* * *

The Nick Cutter she had isolated in ARC-Britain's Permian era was spitting mad at being left behind, frustrated at the isolation, and just a bit frightened though he tried to hide it. He'd had the time, while she was gone, to track down and kill the last of the five immature future predators, none of which had come anywhere near the future anomaly. Perhaps it was only the adults who would do that; the kits, born in another era, might have no knowledge of it.

She helped him bury all the men who had come with him, told him that she'd seen another anomaly over the next hill, and that if he came with her he would have a good view of it. Actually, there were two of them, besides the one she'd opened for herself to King Harry's world. If he didn't go through one of them, he would have an excellent view of their location, for as long as he lived.

When they were coming down the other side of the hill she flipped open a knife and cut him carefully, not getting any blood on herself. She dodged away from him when he swerved in shock, and toward the anomalies she'd made.

"What! Helen, what did I ever do to you?"

"I'm sorry, Nick. You can't have any idea how sorry I am. But you need to go, now. The one on the right would be better, I think."

The gorgonopsid could smell blood from miles away; fortunately for them it had been slowed by the earlier fight with the future predator. Its racing footsteps sounded like thunder. Nick's face paled; he started toward her but she snapped the anomaly shut and waited two minutes. When she reopened it, he was gone. The gorgonopsid's tracks went into where the future anomaly was flickering uncertainly; she shut it immediately. She was sure the gorgonopsid and the future predators would be able to deal with each other without her intervention.

With any luck Nick had gone through the third anomaly, the wild one that had opened unpredictably. Nick's luck had always been better than hers.

She examined the controller. Could it tell the destination of an anomaly that had closed, from whatever temporal residue it might have left, if such a thing existed? Why had she never thought to check that before? Apparently it could, as long as the anomaly had not been closed for long. If this Nick were still alive, he was somewhere between the Pleistocene and the early Paleolithic, where there was plenty of food and shelter if he could avoid cave bears, big cats and dire wolves. Perhaps he'd gone through near her cave above the valley; if so, she hoped he'd use the survival gear she'd left there. She wasn't worried about it confusing later paleobiologists; she'd gone through after the glaciers had retreated and that cave was gone.

She wished that Nick well; he'd had many of the best attributes of her Nick, and fewer of the difficult ones. She just wished him elsewhere, where he would not mess up the timelines.

And on the other side of the anomaly, in the empty Forest of Dean owned by King Harry, she curled up in her hiding place, high in a centuries-old oak tree, and wept from tiredness and frustration. She hated what she'd done, but it was necessary. She'd had to make sure he'd stay lost. Considering the nature of anomalies and how they opened, and Nick's sheer intelligence, there was no way to assume he wouldn't just show up again at the worst possible time, but with her controller she might be able to determine when that would be and steer him into a related era, or possibly an entirely alternate world. She knew there had to be more of them, since she'd found two already. Evolution did not tend toward creating only two of anything.

If Nick had only listened to her experience they could have done great things. Her eyes were wet, and she felt a strange tightness in her chest, as if she couldn't quite breathe. She kept reminding herself that this wasn't her Nick, not really. This Nick was much softer than hers, much more willing to accept her back, even willing to share her with Stephen without asking questions. This Nick had seemed so pleased to see her again, so glad to include her in the anomaly research though he hesitated at going through anomalies himself.

In ARC-Britain she'd been busy for a few months, between working and sleeping with Nick, sleeping with Stephen and making sure she had the ear of Oliver Leek, the obsequious second-in-command who privately whined to her about how his skills were overlooked by the sarcastic Sir James Lester. Leek was a ready-made Iago, fitted to her hand for her use, so eager for her knowledge of the anomalies. Lester's sarcasm was wearing badly on Leek, and as a result Leek was so grateful for the attention – it was fascinating how a couple of hand jobs could focus his mind on her ideas. He could be useful later, she was sure.

She had to keep her eye on the ARC; it had too many people doing research on creatures. It was fine to research differences in taxonomy and chemistry, in anatomy and physiology, to fill in gaps in the fossil record – but she'd heard rumors of cloning that had to be stopped.

And the paranoia of the government in that era made her a little crazy, too. Over time, she had learned what had happened to the ARC-Britain royals whose names she had known from her own world. There had been some kind of explosion 'by suspicious means' at a Buckingham Palace garden party, one of the few events in the royals' calendars that all the relatives were expected to attend. Only Zara Philips, the Queen's granddaughter, who had had a streaming head cold rapidly becoming worse, had been excused by the Queen from attending. According to news accounts, she had felt tired and ill, taken her medicine and lain down to sleep for a while in her apartment, near the vase with the get-well bouquet her grandmother the Queen had sent her, only to be awakened a few hours later by one of the few remaining Yeomen of the Guard and informed that she was now the reigning monarch. All the royals in the succession ahead of her, and no few of those behind her, were dead.

That had been six years ago.

In the interim, security had been tightened within the country in ways she was still working to understand. She was caution itself in dealing with the more secret portions of that government. She couldn't stop them if she were dead, or in one of their more hideous prisons. She had to keep observing them and learning how to work around them, how to deal with them. In many ways it was easier to deal with dinosaurs; they were far more regular and predictable in their habits.

* * *

Only one thing left to do, she considered as she lay in the hot bath in her flat. One bit of birth-world business, besides the usual run to restock supplies, and then she could go through the anomaly into the future, to understand why things had changed and what had caused the change, and how it might be avoided. She hadn't liked the condition of that gray building in the glimpses she'd had of the time ruled by vicious future predators. It had been rough and crumbling in a way she hadn't seen within Britain in her lifetime. It had looked like one of the photos from the Blitz.

Maybe she didn't have to do it. It was micromanagement, after all. But she reminded herself sternly that survival of the fittest was the only way that nature went, anyhow. If the future, however distant, contained those predators, it might not contain much else. She had to know how far distant that future lay. More, she had to make sure that all the ends were tied up in the past.

She found the door open at the house she and Nick had shared, back in her birth-world. The hallway was filled with boxes, up to shoulder height, and Stephen was kneeling to fasten the lid on what would be the bottom one in the next stack.

Her knock on the door brought him to his feet. His jaw dropped open, and he lunged toward her. She started to bring up her arms in defense, but to her surprise he hugged her fiercely. "What happened? We waited for hours – weeks -- and nobody returned through the anomaly."

"The gorgonopsid," she said, over his shoulder. "It was terrible. I had to go into the first anomaly I could find, and it's taken until now for me to get back here."

"Nick –"

"I can tell you it was quick -- but there wasn't enough left of him to bury." She gave a realistic shudder.

He hugged her so tightly she could feel his pounding heart against her chest, then pulled back to look at her, his hands on her shoulders.

"Are you back?"

"It depends," she said, carefully.

He took a breath. "We left everything here as it was. Then when Nick was declared dead, his brother asked us to store the things that were here. The place is going to be rented, or sold, or something. Do you think you could help with that?"

"Declared – what year is it?"

Seven years had passed, he told her. Nick's brother Andrew from Inverness was going to be there in a month to walk through with the realtor; if the place wasn't convenient enough to his new job in Bristol he was going to put it up for rent or sell it to the University.

She really had to find a way to recalibrate that controller; it was becoming imprecise. First the five-year gap in the Permian and now nearly eight years here. But she could wait to do that. She had all the time in several worlds.

"I'll do what I can," she told him, letting a sigh escape her lips. "Of course, I won't have a place to stay when this one's rented."

Stephen's hands dropped from her shoulders. His own shoulders slumped as he looked around the room, filled with Cutter's books, his collected artifacts and what remained of his presence.

"You could stay with me." His words came slowly. She noticed the new lines around his eyes, the deepened nasolabial creases, the strands of gray in his brown hair. "It's been difficult here."

"I realize I'm to blame for some of that, and I'm sorry," she said carefully. "It's good to see you."

Over tea in the kitchen, she asked him about the rest of the little group of researchers. He told her that Abby was now assistant to the head zookeeper at Wellington, married to Connor, who had a doctorate in mechanical engineering and was working as an inventor. Lester was still in the Home Office, but he'd had a hard time replacing Claudia Brown.

"Oh? What happened?" she asked.

"Gorgonopsid came after her in the carpark, out of an anomaly that opened up near her office; it trampled her. Took five marksmen and a tank to bring it down. Couldn't do anything else; the anomaly had closed by then." He pressed his lips together.

"That's terrible," she said carefully. "When did it happen?"

"About a year after you and Cutter disappeared together." Stephen shook his head. "She'd been talking about leaving to work in the City, but it never happened. It … " His eyes went distant. "Lester left. He's assisting the Prime Minister in some other department, something to do with foreign trade."

Ah. That was how it happened.

"And what are you doing now?" She sipped her tea from a cup she'd gotten as a wedding present, her eyes steady on his face.

He came back to the present, blinked once and took a breath. "Teaching Nick's old classes at the University."

"I'm surprised you didn't want to stay here."

"Too many memories." He gazed at her over the rim of his mug, blue eyes like lasers. "I've learned to let go of the animosity, Helen. There's no sense holding onto blame over years and years. I know you. You did the best you could."

She was silent a moment, watching him. "I'll stay. As long as I'm welcome."

"Frankly, I wasn't looking forward to packing all this alone," he said. "You might want some of these things; they're yours, after all. Whatever you like." He shifted in his chair as if the conversation had become too serious for him to deal with, and said in a lighter tone, "Having some help with the rest would be a dream come true."

"It's all right, Stephen," she said, pouring more tea for them both. "It's time I made someone else's dreams come true."

* * *

  


  


Midnight

The stars are soft as flowers, and as near;  
The hills are webs of shadow, slowly spun;  
No separate leaf or single blade is here-  
All blend to one.

No moonbeam cuts the air; a sapphire light  
Rolls lazily, and slips again to rest.  
There is no edged thing in all this night,  
Save in my breast.  


  
\-- Dorothy Parker  


  


**Author's Note:**

> I owe so much to the generous betas who helped me here: siliconshaman, who Britpicked; neotoma73, who attempted to bring me up to date on current thought in paleontology; writerlibrarian and ciann, who raised questions I hadn't considered that made me rethink and rewrite; and zana16, who watched the show with me and debated character development. Any errors here are mine alone.


End file.
